There are printed materials, such as scratch-and-sniff stickers, that incorporate encapsulated aromas designed to generate a scent when a user rubs an image. This technology has been used in a wide variety of books, magazines, and advertisements although most popular use has been in children's books. In social sciences, scent generation opens the possibility of forming memories, triggering responses, and eliciting emotion. For humans and many animals, olfaction is one of the primary sensory inputs that can be used to draw attention, create interest, and enhance engagement. This makes scent generation technologies useful for a wide variety of purposes including more realistic immersive experiences, eliciting conditioned responses, entertainment, advertising, and education. For example, scent features can complement future digital textbooks and mobile interactive education applications targeted at improving student engagement and learning outcomes.
Current computer-based applications and games played on computers or a gaming platform employ the same advanced graphics and sound qualities found in film or video. These technologies create an audiovisual experience that immerses the user in a film or game like never before, stimulating sight, sound and even tactile sensations through deep bass vibrations provided by subwoofers and tactile feedback provided by some game controllers. There remains, however, one form of sensory perception that is not stimulated—the sense of smell.
Numerous prior art systems have attempted to provide a scent to the environment that compliments or correlates to an audiovisual stimulus. Examples include the smell of burning rubber coordinating with the screech of tires, or the scent of flowers when a corresponding image appears. Prior art systems have primarily been directed to introducing fragrances to large environments, such as an entire theater. These systems have by and large suffered from the problem that a fragrance will linger long after the coordinating audiovisual input has changed, and may in fact be difficult to replace with another scent as the scenes change. None of these prior art devices, however, provide a useful and commercially viable system for fragrance delivery to enhance an audiovisual presentation.